Patriot PS-100 32GB SSD

A 32GB SSD drive for $60 after MiR sounded like a good idea, especially since that would be great for a Windows Home Server C:\ drive, so I purchased a Patriot PS-100 32GB. (It should be noted that I have not seen the price for $60 again in the following 3 months) 64MB of cache sounded better than a JMicron JMF602 based drive, and surely Patriot would not release in the fall of 2009 a JMicron branded drive. I assumed that the drive would be Samsung, Indilinx (akin to an OCZ Core V2) since 32GB was not an Intel controller sounding size (40GB, 80GB, 160GB MLC to date). My conjecture proved to be inaccurate.

Opening the drive one can clearly see the Toshiba flash, Hynix DRAM that is the cache, and a chip that says Phison.

Internal view of the Patriot PS-100 32GB

So the question is, what is a Phison? Here’s a closeup of the chip:

Phison Controller in the Patriot PS-100

Of course the first question I had was, how does it perform? Here’s the CrystalDiskMark of the Patriot PS-100 32GB:

What's up with those write speeds? 4k?

I thought that was an odd result for a SSD on a 3.2GHz Core i7 920/X58 system, especially plugged directly into the ICH10R. I re-ran CrystalDiskMark five times, then tried it three times in the PM45 based laptop before realizing that this was repeatable on both platforms. ATTO was a bit better:

ATTO showed a much better picture than CrystalDiskmark

Just for comparison… here are a few other CrystalDiskMark runs on other drives.

OCZ Agility 60GB CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark Intel X18-M G1

It just so happens that my 60GB Agility and 120GB Vertex (non-turbo) perform very similarly so I only posted the Agility CrystalDiskMark. Still, the Patriot PS-100 gets obliterated on the read and 4k write tests. Being fair, the Patriot drive is extremely inexpensive at $89.99 – 30 rebate at Fry’s on 25 November 2009. On the other hand, it does make a strong case for the 40GB Kingston and upcoming Intel SSD’s that went on sale for $115/ 40GB. Also of note, the speed is substantially better than a 7,200rpm drive, and one gets all of the no-noise and vibration that comes along with a SSD.

Here’s a quick Agility ATTO run:

OCZ Agility 60GB ATTO

As one can see, the Patriot drive is a fair amount slower, which is to be expected at its low pricepoint.

I’m going to spend the next few days playing around with the drives looking for signs of stutter. Also, I picked up a second drive just to see what will happen in Raid 0.

About the Author

Patrick Kennedy

Patrick has been running ServeTheHome since 2009 and covers a wide variety of home and small business IT topics. For his day job, Patrick is a management consultant focused in the technology industry and has worked with numerous large hardware and storage vendors in the Silicon Valley. The goal of STH is simply to help users find some information about basic server building blocks. If you have any helpful information please feel free to post on the forums.

see the last 2 posts. I repeated this test 3 times and all came out the same. Maybe HD Tune is doing something funny. This is tested on a Dell Precision T3500 on Xeon i7 2.66ghz and Intel ICH10R on board controller.

That odd spiking isn’t exactly stuttering like the JMicron JMF 602 based drives had. I haven’t been seeing the JMicron style stutter. That being said, the access times are really high as quik2 has eluded to. Somewhere in the range of 1ms.

nekon, there is a TON of advantage to using SSD’s as boot drives as boot is one of the areas where there is a lot of random access and small 4k reads/writes. All of my machines currently use SSD’s in them and all spindle based disks are now relegated to servers for storage. If I need to access files it is all over GigE/ Wireless N, and the setup works great.

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Holy smokes this is one killer drive if going by the AS-SSD bench, but comes up short in the Crystal Disk bench. That's odd. Patrick, any word on pricing, just for curiosities' sake, there's likely no way I could afford one? Is the P3700 (NVMe IIRC) in a different league than this drive?

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